4 key questions to find the right GTM motion

What are your options?

There are only so many ways a buyer can first hear about you and end up talking to your team. Credit for this way of sorting them goes to Roberge, who laid out six options in “6 Demand Gen Channel Options for Startups.”

A quick note on words. A motion isn’t a channel. A channel is where a message reaches someone: Google, LinkedIn, email, a trade show. A motion is the repeatable way you turn strangers into customers, and it combines channels with the people and process behind them. Outbound, for example, runs across email, phone and LinkedIn. Roberge calls these “channels”; I say “motions” because who does the work, and how, matters as much as where the message shows up.

Treat them as archetypes drawn from what practitioners have seen work rather than a scientific model. They’re a starting point (but you should tailor to your business), and the edges blur in practice. The only way to know what works for you is to test, hedge your bets and watch what actually brings in customers.

Early on, get one motion working before you spread budget across several. An early-stage company can run two or three well. Past that, each one gets too little money and attention to prove itself. Keep the list short, and prove each one before adding the next.

Once one is working, a second can make it stronger. HubSpot, where Roberge ran sales, paired its inbound marketing with an inside sales team that followed up on the leads the content brought in. The content meant reps called people who were already curious, and the reps made sure that curiosity turned into revenue. Each motion made the other cheaper to run.

Inbound: being found

Look up almost any search engine optimization (SEO) or digital ads term, and there’s a good chance Semrush shows up somewhere on the first page. That’s inbound: you teach buyers something useful, and some of them come back when they’re ready to buy. The education comes through content, like articles, guides, webinars and newsletters.

It works when buyers research on their own and your topic isn’t already buried under everyone else’s content. It’s also slow. Plan on months before it brings in steady interest, and on someone following up quickly when a reader does raise their hand.

Outbound: reaching out first

Outbound means contacting people who haven’t asked to hear from you: a targeted list, then emails, calls and LinkedIn messages that give them a reason to talk. Salesforce turned it into a system by splitting the job in two, with sales development reps (SDRs) who only prospect and account executives who spend their time closing. That split is still common today.

Salesforce later went further and organized its sellers around industries, so the person closing a hospital deal knows hospitals. That’s the part worth copying if you sell into more than one vertical. Outbound only pays off when each customer is worth enough to cover the reps; Roberge puts the floor at roughly $10K a year.

Account-based: choosing your accounts

Account-based work flips the usual order. Instead of attracting many buyers and filtering, sales and marketing agree on a list of accounts and work each one deliberately. The Big Four consulting firms have long run their largest clients this way, with a lead partner, a team spanning service lines and a plan for where the relationship goes next.

Picture it in your own company. You’d tier your accounts. A handful get a one-to-one plan, a few dozen get grouped by industry or situation and the rest get lighter treatment. For the top tier, someone writes an account-level strategy: who’s in the decision, what’s on their agenda this year and which message fits each person. Content gets written for one company at a time, and sales and marketing review the same accounts together every week or two. If that sounds like more coordination than your team has today, that’s useful to know before you start.

Paid: buying attention

Paid works best when people are already searching at the moment they need you. Law firms typically work this way. Someone typing “wrongful dismissal lawyer” into Google has a problem today, and the firm near the top gets the call.

That’s also its limit. Paid captures demand that already exists. If buyers don’t know your category exists, you’re paying to show an answer to a question nobody is asking. It also helps to have a simple offer and a narrow audience the platforms can target precisely.

Product-led: letting the product sell

With product-led growth (PLG), the product makes the first sale. People try it, get value, then pay. Calendly is a textbook case. Every time someone sends a booking link, the person on the other end uses the product, sees the brand and can create a free page of their own right after. Each meeting doubles as a small demo.

It needs a product whose value people feel in minutes, a category they already look for and a natural reason to show it to others. Most B2B products have one or two of those. Sales still has a role, usually later, helping the companies where usage has already spread.

Partners: borrowing trust

Partners let you borrow trust someone else has already earned. Clio, the Vancouver legal software company, is recommended and offered as a member benefit by more than 100 bar associations and law societies. A lawyer who hears about practice software from their own bar association starts in a very different place than one who sees an ad.

Partners pay off when your buyers already buy through someone else, or when your product bundles easily into what a partner sells. Roberge adds a condition worth respecting: prove your own direct selling first. A partner can’t sell something you haven’t worked out how to sell yourself.

My own practice runs partly on this. A good share of Paperplane’s clients come through collaborators in adjacent disciplines, like revenue operations (RevOps) consultants and user experience (UX) agencies, who bring me in when a client’s problem sits upstream of theirs.

Community: a different kind of motion

Community means showing up where your buyers gather to learn from each other, or giving them a place to do it. Maja Voje, who added it to the list, is bullish on it for early-stage companies. I think it works best as a multiplier: paired with another motion, it makes that one cheaper and more credible. On its own, it’s slow to turn into revenue.

Joining an existing community. The faster version is showing up where your buyers already are. Crayon, a competitive intelligence tool, partnered with the Product Marketing Alliance, sponsoring its competitive analysis Slack channel and its podcast. Product marketers are exactly who buys Crayon, and alliance members have repeatedly voted it the category leader in their annual tool rankings.

Building your own. The slower version is creating the place yourself. Clay moved its customer support into a public Slack group early on, so users learned from each other in the open. Today there are more than 60 Clay Clubs, user-run meetups in over 30 countries. It works because it sits next to a free product: people learn in the community, then build in the tool. Building your own is a cold start, and it usually takes years to pay off.

Who you need to run it

Each of these also decides what your marketing has to be particularly good at, and in my experience, that’s where companies stumble most. Inbound needs a writer who knows the buyer’s world, not a generalist. Outbound needs SDRs, plus someone who owns the targeting and the message. Account-based needs senior sellers who can manage a room of six decision-makers, working alongside marketers who can write for one company. Paid needs someone who runs fast tests and reads the numbers honestly. Product-led hands acquisition to product and engineering. Partners need a partner manager who treats partners like a sales team to equip, which is its own discipline. And community needs someone your buyers already see as one of their own, plus the patience to wait years for it to pay off. That’s another reason to be selective. Every motion you add is another set of capabilities to build internally.

It’s also why hiring the right marketer is hard. Someone who drove results in their last company either walked into a formula that already worked or built one for that business. Either way, what worked in one business rarely transfers perfectly to another one.

Who are you selling to?

That borrowed formula is part of the problem. Most of the GTM advice that circulates on LinkedIn comes from SaaS companies selling to other SaaS companies. That’s a real group of buyers. It’s just one of several.

These are my groupings, not an established taxonomy.

Plenty of companies sit in two groups. A pharma company buying manufacturing systems behaves like a concentrated industrial, while the same company buying clinical trial software behaves like a regulated buyer. Pick the group that drives the purchase you’re selling into.

Digital natives

If most of the GTM advice you read fits your buyers, they’re probably in this group. These buyers research on their own, try the product and would rather not speak to sales until they have to.

Atlassian reached its first $100M in revenue without a sales team, and it now invests in enterprise sales for its largest accounts. Self-serve goes a long way with these buyers, but the biggest deals still need a person.

Regulated and trust-heavy

The purchase is driven by the cost of getting it wrong, so trust and proof come before price. A $10K contract can still need a security review, a compliance questionnaire and a named contact. Hospitals rarely buy alone. In Canada, each province and territory runs its own health purchasing, and national not-for-profit buying groups like HealthPRO and Mohawk Medbuy negotiate for hundreds of hospitals at once.

Medical device makers show how far the human help can go. Reps from companies like Medtronic are often in the operating room during surgery, answering the surgeon’s questions about the device, adjusting its settings to the physician’s instructions and making sure the right instruments are there. Before they get through the door, hospitals run background checks, verify their vaccinations and train them on sterile technique and patient privacy. Once inside, they can advise but can’t touch the patient.

Fragmented operators

Many small buyers, often not at a desk, who buy from people they know. That’s the squeeze. The buyer needs a person, and the deal size can’t pay for one.

Toast found a way out. Its initial public offering (IPO) filing describes restaurant owners buying from people they know and trust, so it built a local sales force to match. Payments make up over 80% of its revenue, and that’s most likely what pays for the reps.

A Quebec legaltech platform I worked with, which helps construction subcontractors get paid, sold into an industry that’s rarely quick to adopt new software. Its buyers weren’t searching for digital tools, yet paid ads were its biggest marketing line. We cut paid to the smallest line and moved the money into outbound, trade associations and events. In the first two and a half months of 2026, it matched all of 2025’s revenue.

Concentrated industrials

A few hundred possible buyers at most, buying through procurement teams, committees and approved-vendor lists. When there are only so many accounts, every one matters, so account-based work starts even at mid-sized deals.

Airbus has only so many airlines to sell to, so each one gets its own campaign. Its marketing teams work airline by airline on cabin layouts, operating costs and how a fleet fits the route network, and those conversations can run for months or years.

Professional services

Trust is personal. Buyers ask peers who they’d use, and a referral from the right person beats any amount of reach, even on small engagements.

Clio’s route into law firms, covered above under partners, shows the pattern. Lawyers heard about it from their own bar association, a source they already trusted, and that recommendation did work no ad budget could.

Are buyers already looking?

Demand here means demand for your specific kind of solution: are buyers already shopping for something like it? That’s a narrower question than whether the problem exists. A problem can be real, costly and widespread while almost nobody looks for a fix, because buyers have a workaround, don’t know a fix exists or don’t see it as a problem yet.

Your GTM has to take potential customers from where they are today to considering your solution, and then to committing to it. How far they have to travel depends on where they start.

The same legaltech platform shows how this plays out in a new category. Most of its market wasn’t looking for a solution at all. The few who were searching had already been left unpaid by a client and were typing a specific legal term. That’s established demand, but it only exists once something has gone wrong. The much bigger market was every other subcontractor, who had the problem but wasn’t shopping for a fix. We did both, capturing the emergency searches right away and building awareness of payment protection for the long run.

How much buyers have to learn also matters. A team switching from one CRM to another already knows what it’s buying, so the trip is short. Subcontractors who had never heard of the protection the legaltech platform offered had a much longer one, which is part of why its budget moved toward outbound, trade associations and events, where someone could explain it in person. The further buyers have to travel, the more human help each deal needs.

What is a customer worth?

Industry and demand describe what your buyers need. Deal size decides what you can afford to give them. What a customer pays you each year sets a ceiling on how much human help you can give to win them.

Jacco van der Kooij maps this in Revenue Architecture. Simplified, and with the numbers as rough guides:

• Under about $5K a year: no one in the sale. Buyers sign up and pay on their own, and companies here serve customers by the tens or hundreds of thousands.
• About $5K to $50K: people selling from a desk. Deals happen over video and phone, sometimes with one person finding prospects and another closing them.
• $50K and up: people in the room. Sellers meet buyers in person, deals go through committees and, above roughly $500K a year, a dedicated team runs each account.

The industry you serve moves these lines. A regulated buyer can need a person at $10K, while a digital native might sign a $30K contract without talking to anyone. That’s the last column of the industry table at work: the groups that expect more human help pull the lines down, and digital natives push them up.

Most mismatches come from this ceiling clashing with what the buyer needs. Taken to the extreme, they’re easy to spot:

• Flying a sales rep across the country to close a $500-a-month CRM subscription. Between the flight, the hotel and two days of the rep’s time, a big share of the first year’s revenue is gone before anyone signs.
• A “Buy now” button for a $400K hospital system. No hospital buys that way, however smooth the checkout.

Where the answers meet

In the end, two things have to line up. Your industry and the state of demand tell you what buyers need before they’ll buy: where they look, who they trust and how much convincing it takes. Deal size tells you what you can afford to give them. The motion that works sits where the two meet.

When they don’t, the fix usually sits upstream, in a strategic choice: a narrower segment, a different price or a partner who already has the buyer’s trust.

Once the motion is set, it also decides how you’re organized: who you hire first and where marketing hands off to sales. I’d argue that’s where most of the real work starts.

Most of the time, the answers rule out more motions than they rule in. That’s a good outcome. It tells you where not to spend.

So look at your last ten customers. Does your motion match how they found you and how they bought?